Remote Collaboration for Field Service - Defining Specification and Prototyping
In cooperation with Siemens CT
Possibility to get a students job at Siemens CT
Motivation
Service and maintenance of industrial plants and products has become more and more complex in recent years. Quite often, plant subsystems are delivered by different vendors, raising addl. problems for fault diagnosis and repair.
Therefore, field service technicians must either have a very high and specialized skill level to solve these tasks in a reasonable time / within a reasonable cost frame, or other support technologies are provided.
Scenario
One method to mitigate these problems is to send universally trained technicians on-site and to support them by expert technicians via so-called Remote Collaboration. The on-site technician would be equipped with a wirelessly connected mobile pc, e. g. a tablet PC or a wearable PC, camera, microphone, etc. The goal is to present the remotely located experts the same “view” on the problem as the on-site technician has. Depending on the tasks to solve, this may require visual-/ acoustic- communication, data / application sharing, etc.
Task Description
There are a number of systems in the market, which potentially support this kind of remote collaboration scenario (MS Life Communication Server, Interwise, Arel, etc.). However, these systems rather aim at remote collaboration or video conferencing within an office environment. Therefore, a careful examination of such systems must be carried out, to decide which system fulfils best the requirements associated with the scenario described above. For missing Features a solution has to be found or implemented.
- Interview users (field operators/ experts )
- Refinement of the scenario
- Requirements specification of the application
- Software studies and benchmark (Usability, Performance, Security Aspects, Session Documentation, etc)
- Decide on the platform
- Implementation of the scenario
- Evaluate this application against the requirements (with field ops from Siemens ?)